5 Answers
5

The simple answer is no. If you have a dvi and have lost the TeX there are tools such as dvi2tty which will extract the text and some of the paragraph structure, but in general you will have to add the markup back by hand.

No, technically it cannot be done. DVI, PDF and postscript contain text arranged on a page according to instructions in a (La)TeX document. You can extract the text, and you can try to guess at commands that would generate a similar page, and you might even guess well. But you'd be doing it by matching the result. If there is a number in the text, for example, you can never know for sure if it was typed literally or came from a TeX counter. Imagine eating a cake and trying to reconstruct the recipe: If you're good you can identify the ingredients and guess a lot about what was done, but the recipe itself is not in the cake.

Despite what some others said, it's not at all like disassembling: Executable code contains the algorithm, and disassembly just translates it to a human-readable language. Going from dvi to LaTeX is more like trying to reconstruct a C program from its output: Reverse engineering is a better term for it.

With DVI files I think it would at least be partially possible. Of course all high-level macros and stuff like that would be lost. Compare the task to recovering, e.g., C++ code from a compiled binary file.

Technically it is not impossible to get a Tex file that compiles to the given DVI or PS file.

For simple documents, one could devise a method that first performs OCR on the DVI or PS file, and then converts the result into a Tex file. By re-compiling the Tex document and comparing the results to the DVI or PS file, errors could be identified, which in turn could be corrected by iterating over several possible characters.